Englishman in New York

One of the more unusual aspects of moving to New York has been to find myself playing the role of American apologist whenever I am home in England, on holiday or entertaining guests from abroad.

A few years ago I would have been on the other side of the table, railing against “Bush, the neocons and US foreign policy.” Today, though I am critical of all three, I don’t think the US as a whole should be regarded as the font of all evil and land of the dumb.

Some might say that I have gone local. Perhaps they are right. But it’s not that I think everything America says and does is okay. It’s just that living here, I find myself more inclined towards the view that America is driven by a multitude of factors rather than by a cabal of neocons, Christian evangelicals and “the Jewish lobby.”

America bashing is fine, as long as it’s done with some thought. After all, Europe takes enough of a pummeling over here, much of it undeserved and born of the same ignorance that fuels anti-Americanism in Europe.

But, for me, one of the more alarming opinions I have heard in the last couple of years, often from otherwise rational, intelligent people—many of them good friends—is that the US government was somehow complicit in the September 11 terror attacks.

Is it really so hard to believe that Al Qaeda was capable of flying planes into the World Trade Center and that the resulting fires could have caused the buildings’ collapse?

You have to begin in a very dark place to suspect that people within the US government would connive to help/facilitate an attack on such a scale in their own country in order to provide a pretext for war and personal or financial gain. Then again, when the bogeyman is America or Israel I suppose anything is possible.

A recent story in the New York Times reminded me just how easily people will ignore the stated aims of a particular group in favor of a conspiracy theory that plays to their prejudices and fears.

The story is about a World Wildlife Fund project to conserve an enormous nature reserve on the Rio Negro in Brazil. But, according to the Times, many Brazilians believe it is a covert operation by foreign powers to take over the country’s natural resources:

“This is a new form of colonialism, an open conspiracy in which economic and financial interests act through nongovernmental organizations,” said Lorenzo Carrasco, editor and co-author of “The Green Mafia,” a widely circulated anti-environmentalist polemic. “It is evident these interests want to block the development of Brazil and the Amazon region by creating and controlling these reserves, which are full of minerals and other valuable natural resources.”

Such views are widely held in Brazil, cutting across regional and class lines. In a survey of 2,000 people in 143 cities conducted in person in 2005 by the country’s leading polling organization, Ibope, 75 percent said that Brazil’s natural riches could provoke a foreign invasion, and nearly three out of five distrusted the activities of environmental groups.

[…]The notion that foreigners covet the Amazon has long been widespread in Brazil, fed in part by anxiety about the central government’s tenuous control of the region. Those concerns have been exacerbated in recent years by the Internet, which has become a home for fabricated documents and declarations meant to convince Brazilians that their sovereignty is at risk.

The most notorious example is a widely reproduced map supposedly used in an American middle-school geography textbook. Rife with misspellings and errors of syntax of a type common to speakers of Romance languages like Portuguese, it shows the Amazon as an “international reserve,” and describes Brazilians as “monkeys” incapable of managing the rain forest.

Other spurious documents say that both President Bush and Al Gore made speeches during the 2000 presidential campaign in favor of wresting the Amazon from Brazil. Elsewhere, the documents quote an apocryphal American general, who leads an agency that the Pentagon says does not exist, as saying, “In the event Brazil decides to use the Amazon in a way that puts the environment of the United States at risk, we must be ready to interrupt that process immediately.”

The full story is here.

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Gary Kasparov has an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today comparing Putin’s Russia to the Godfather.

Read in the context of a Mario Puzo novel, Russia’s actions make complete sense. And, considering the speed with which biznesmeni took over Russian life after the collapse of Communism, it follows that Russia Inc is now being run along mafia lines.

The web of betrayals, the secrecy, the blurred lines between what is business, what is government, and what is criminal — it’s all there in Mr. Puzo’s books. A historian looks at the Kremlin today and sees elements of Mussolini’s “corporate state,” Latin American juntas and Mexico’s pseudo-democratic PRI machine. A Puzo fan sees the Putin government more accurately: the strict hierarchy, the extortion, the intimidation, the code of secrecy and, above all, the mandate to keep the revenue flowing. In other words, a mafia.

If a member of the inner circle goes against the Capo, his life is forfeit. Once Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky wanted to go straight and run his Yukos oil company as a legitimate corporation and not as another cog in Mr. Putin’s KGB, Inc. He quickly found himself in a Siberian prison, his company dismantled and looted, and its pieces absorbed by the state mafia apparatus of Rosneft and Gazprom.

The Yukos case has become a model. Private companies are absorbed into the state while at the same time the assets of the state companies move into private accounts.

Alexander Litvinenko was a KGB agent who broke the loyalty code by fleeing to Britain. Worse, he violated the law of omertà by going to the press and even publishing books about the dirty deeds of Mr. Putin and his foot soldiers. Instead of being taken fishing in the old-fashioned Godfather style, he was killed in London in the first recorded case of nuclear terrorism. Now the Kremlin is refusing to hand over the main suspect in the murder.

Mr. Putin can’t understand Britain doing potential harm to its business interests over one human life. That’s an alien concept. In his world, everything is negotiable. Morals and principles are just chips on the table in the Kremlin’s game. There is no mere misunderstanding in the Litvinenko case; there are two different languages being spoken.

Don Putin (subscription required).

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Putin doesn’t mince his words about the latest falling out with Britain:

They should get their heads examined rather than tell us to change our constitution.

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Is the Campaign for Little Britain really as altruistic as it claims? Of course not, it’s a marketing campaign. But what if one of the central tenets of the campaign—that it is fighting primarily to retain the character of a neighborhood—is a red herring?

One of the campaign’s main arguments has been to portray the fight as the little guy versus the big chain stores, or as commenter CFLB says:

“…it’s merely two words on one sign post to help preserve a section of the West Village. Say what you like about T&S [Tea and Sympathy] but they are a small business who contribute to the personality and diversity of ther (sic) neighborhood, unless of course you want to see yet what another Starbucks or Ralph Lauren store.

Fortunately our numerous supporters would sooner see a small local business stand up for itself [and others] against the big brands.

I am sure they would. But what if Tea and Sympathy wanted to become a big brand itself? Not on a par with Ralph Lauren, of course. But one that was recognized throughout America as the premier British tea shop. Wouldn’t it be great if the business was located at the heart of New York’s official Little Britain neighborhood? Just think how many teabags you could sell.

The Campaign for Little Britain website doesn’t mention any of this. Neither does the website of their marketing company The Joneses. But I could have sworn that a previous iteration of the Joneses’ website did. Wait a minute. What’s this?

So the truth is that the Campaign for Little Britain wants to rename Greenwich Avenue so that Tea and Sympathy can become a nationally recognized brand and sell cookbooks and tea. An excellent reason to rename a New York street.

5pm Postscript: Rereading this post, I can’t help but feel like a bit of a twit. As I’ve said in the comments, I don’t have anything against Tea & Sympathy. I wish them well. In fact, as Nick points out, America could do with a good cup of tea. It’s just the marketing idea of renaming a city block that gets me. A storm in a teacup?

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In light of the mildly anti-Semitic remark in the comments section here, and the CFLB’s less than honest approach to my comments system as a whole, I found this post by Joel Spolsky quite interesting:

You don’t have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else’s thoughts. That’s not freedom of expression, that’s an infringement on their freedom of expression. Get your own space, write compelling things, and if your ideas are smart, they’ll be linked to, and Google will notice, and you’ll move up in PageRank, and you’ll have influence and your ideas will have power.

When a blog allows comments right below the writer’s post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody … nobody … would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words.

Spolsky’s thoughts were inspired by a longer post on the subject by Dave Winer (who, by the way, does not think a blog must have comments). I’m already late for my date with Galileo at NYPL, but I hope to give these articles the time they deserve later.

A blog without comments?

(PS Thanks for the tip, Nick!)

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This was the scene outside the New York Public Library yesterday when the “Midtown Volcano” erupted. Inside, no one had a clue what was going on.

I have a vague memory of hearing a loud bang and assuming it was just a thunderclap as we’ve had a number of thunderstorms lately. Despite the headlines of gridlock and mass panic, when I left the library at 7pm (admittedly by the side entrance on 42nd Street) it was as though nothing had happened. I only found out about it when I got home.

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I spent most of today at New York Public Library researching a new project about Galileo Galilei. One of the reasons I went to NYPL was because it holds two copies of The Private Life of Galileo, by Mary Allan-Olney. The book was published in 1870 and is currently available on Amazon for the bargain price of $165. NYPL has two copies, in fairly good condition, for free.

I’m ashamed to say it but it’s the first time I have been inside NYPL since I arrived in New York almost four years ago. The research room, as you can see, is spectacular.

I had a very productive day, not least because the wireless internet doesn’t stretch to the third floor reading room. But when the time arrived to xerox pages to study at home I hit a snag. I had to pay for library staff to make copies because the book was so delicate. The cost, 40 cents a page, wasn’t too bad. But someone had just put in an order for over 1,000 pages and there was a two-week waiting list for the service.

One of the librarians said I might be able to get copies sooner if the book was on microfilm. But before I looked into that, she wondered whether I had looked on Google Books. And there it was: The Private Life of Galileo, all 3oo pages, neatly scanned, easily searchable, instantly printable and free of charge.

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